I agree with the title, I currently have 6 browser extensions installed, 3 of them are custom built extensions that I made for myself, 2 others are “public” extensions that I contributed new features to. There is something truly liberating about being able to customize your experience on any website, the same way it’s liberating to be able to customize the way your editor behaves.
ultimately I sold the extension to Tweet Hunter in a recent acquisition.
This is bad, really really bad. Browser extensions have access to an enormous amount of private information, when a user trusts you enough to install your extension, that trust should not be transferred to any other party (especially when it happens completely silently, the way it happens on browser extension stores). If Tweemex users felt okay trusting a single person building a tweeter extension for himself with their data when they installed Tweemex, it does not imply that they trust a company in the business of tweeter analytics.
100% agree on the sale of extensions. I’m generally pretty tolerant of devs wanting to monetize their work, even if I don’t necessarily agree with their approach… but selling a browser extension out from under people is the kind of betrayal of your users that would make me never want to trust someone again.
I recently made a browser extension to track which link opened a given tab, so I can ask “what opened this?” and see where I found it. Really handy for long research dives!
Browser extensions are also great for things like silly-idea-hackathons, you can do wildly creative things to the experience of being online with relatively little code. Here’s one from a few months ago https://github.com/hkolbeck/http-blur
I agree with the title, I currently have 6 browser extensions installed, 3 of them are custom built extensions that I made for myself, 2 others are “public” extensions that I contributed new features to. There is something truly liberating about being able to customize your experience on any website, the same way it’s liberating to be able to customize the way your editor behaves.
This is bad, really really bad. Browser extensions have access to an enormous amount of private information, when a user trusts you enough to install your extension, that trust should not be transferred to any other party (especially when it happens completely silently, the way it happens on browser extension stores). If Tweemex users felt okay trusting a single person building a tweeter extension for himself with their data when they installed Tweemex, it does not imply that they trust a company in the business of tweeter analytics.
100% agree on the sale of extensions. I’m generally pretty tolerant of devs wanting to monetize their work, even if I don’t necessarily agree with their approach… but selling a browser extension out from under people is the kind of betrayal of your users that would make me never want to trust someone again.
I recently made a browser extension to track which link opened a given tab, so I can ask “what opened this?” and see where I found it. Really handy for long research dives!
Is this publicly available anywhere? I could use something like this.
some assembly required
Browser extensions are also great for things like silly-idea-hackathons, you can do wildly creative things to the experience of being online with relatively little code. Here’s one from a few months ago https://github.com/hkolbeck/http-blur